105 comments to Unthreaded

We’re told that sixteen years isn’t enough to draw any conclusions as to whether warming has stalled.
The meteorologists favour 30-year intervals before commenting on climatic changes.
However, given that we’re ultimately talking about warming, are there any professional statisticians out there who could comment on what analyses are appropriate, given the myriad temperature readings which have been taken over that time?

Wattsupwiththat has posted up a something about the global warming consensus, pointing to other corroborating evidence for recent lack of warming lack of warming.

My own comment, which applies here as well was:-

There is always a rider that should be put on any look at warming trends. A small amount of historical warming is nothing to be concerned about. It is catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) that justifies government policies. This is projected as something for the future. Demonstration that warming is happening, along with signposts of the impending adverse consequences are necessary, but far from sufficient, conditions to substantiate these claims. The many failures in short-term predictions reduces the weighting (credibility) that is given to the CAGW projections. This, in turn, affects the cost-benefit justifications for policy.

We are sometimes told by the warminista glitterati that the close agreement of a dozen different climate models indicates that all the IPCC scientists are on the right track and the model predictions should be believed. Well aside from that being a total non-sequitur regardless of how the models are designed, there is also this informative comment by a climate scientist who studied the software architectures of several GCMs.

There are benefits and drawbacks to the rising overlap and “modularity” of Earth system models. One could argue that it makes the models less independent. If they all agree closely, how much of that agreement is due to their physical grounding in reality, and how much is due to the fact that they all use a lot of the same code? However, modularity is clearly a more efficient process for model development. It allows larger communities of scientists from each sub-discipline of Earth system modelling to form, and – in the case of MOM and NEMO – make two or three really good ocean models, instead of a dozen mediocre ones. Concentrating our effort, and reducing unnecessary duplication of code, makes modularity an attractive strategy, if an imperfect one.

So even the consensus of models was arranged rather than being freely given. Perhaps in evolutionary terms only a few models prosper in a funding environment that contains enormous selection pressure for politically correct results. The copying and hybridisation of code that maximises political patronage would then also explain the commonality amongst models at least as well as the “reducing unnecessary duplication” explanation. Actually, considering the results of Lindzen and Choi 2011 showing all 12 of the IPCC models predicted the opposite of observed reality for LWIR at TOA, the political selection pressure hypothesis explains the commonality amongst GCMs a helluvalot better than mere labour efficiency concerns.

Your model code can be any colour you like, as long as it’s Blue State.

Carbon500, even without a 16 year stall, as I say, the warming has been “natural.” No quotes needed there, really. Real Science did a post headlined What happened to the feedbacks? An excerpt: Hansen’s theory was [that] “CO2 forcing” .. would trigger all kinds of really bad things, which would feed back and produce an exponential rise in temperature. … Instead, temperatures have flatlined for 16 years – so they have switched over to making up BS about extreme weather.
My comment: If CO2 were to heat things up, which it doesn’t, the net result would be extra water vapor, you know, clouds, which would cool things down. Right? Not according to the warmists. It’s another one of their insane upside down ideas. If fact, they maintain that for every degree of CO2 initiated warming, 3 additional degrees of water vapor induced warming would occur. Now, that would cause a whole shitload of additional CO2 to come out of the oceans (because CO2 levels change as a result of temperature changes), which would cause more heating, which would cause a lot more clouds, and so more heating, and so more CO2 coming out of the oceans, on and on, until the oceans are boiling. A runaway greenhouse effect.
But that’s not the way it is. Look at this short video that shows algor to be a buffoon in the false claims he made about CO2 in his movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg&info=GGWarmingSwindle_CO2Lag. The video shows that CO2 rises and falls as a result of temperature change, that is the clear correlation, and their is no indication that CO2 causes temperature change. And talk about feedbacks, if CO2 were both a cause and an effect of temperature change, any rise in CO2 would feed upon itself like starving piranhas, and so a long long time ago we would have had a runaway greenhouse effect … until the oceans boiled. But we haven’t had that, even though in the past CO2 rose to as high as 7100ppm. There is no way CO2 is both a cause and effect of temperature change. Is there anything wrong with my reasoning? Please inform me of what it is if you think that’s the case.

To Eric Simpson, Magicbeancounter and Peter and others – thanks for your comments.
Let there be no doubt – I don’t believe a word of the CAGW story.
The main reason for my question was to get an opinion from someone involved professionally with statistical analysis so as to dot the ‘i’s and ‘t’s for use in future discussions.
Moving away from the stats question, it seems to me that climate science seems to have dug itself a pit dependent on models rather than proper research based on the real world. Some time ago I read a paper I got ‘on line’ claiming that CO2 was the ‘control knob’ governing the world’s climate.
How did the author come to this conclusion? By using climate models!
I recall reading a magazine comment by a Russian scientist based in the arctic circle. His comment was that CAGW was something dreamed up by people who work in offices, and that they should get out more – this seems a reasonable point of view, particularly as it comes from a field researcher.

The real problem for the CAGW priesthood is that by using the 30 year meme, they are now stuck in the period of satellite measurements. They can no long refer to their massively adjusted GISS and Hadcrud land temps before 1979. I can’t find the actual thread link at the moment (Real Climate somewhere), but it has been shown that once remove all the “adjustments” in these to fabrication, there hasn’t been much warming since the 1900′s or before.

Any significant warming trend through from 1900-present ONLY EXISTS in the manufactured global land temperature record, courtesy James Hansen and friends. It is a fabrication, a lie. !!!

The satellite record is not at all kind to the CAGW bletheren. Because the satellite record is real and not fabricated like GISS etc, it shows only a very slight trend rise from 1979-1997, a step change and rebound from 1998-2001, and from 2002 onwards, a slight downward trend.

Giss temp site has been down for over a month now. Up to 12 months ago, one could access the ‘raw’ data for each station and compare them with the ‘homogenised’ data. Then the ‘raw’ data disappeared into the archives (though the records could still be accessed it if you had the original web address).
It will be interesting to see the individual records when the interactive site is back on line to see if there has been further adjustment.

Hansen has gone even more rabid over the last year or so.. (if that’s possible).

So expect further adjustments to increase trends.

Problem for him is that he can’t really fudge numbers since 1979 because of the satellite temperature measurements, and any tampering of the pre-1979 record is now basically irrelevant to the CO2 arguement.

It’s ironic that IF in the early days of climate research, any temperatures were “adjusted” warmer than actual temps, by now it would come back to bite them in the arse since there are more and better measurements done by a wider groups of scientists. This would appear as a flattening or down trend today.

There may be truth in what you say, Mark.
GISS has three years warmer than 1998 whereas HADCRUT, RSS and UAH all have 1998 as their hottest years.
This may be because GISS include the Arctic by shadowing/extrapolating nearby weather stations which allows GISS to adjust the global temperature (always upwards).
I believe HADCRUT have another version pending which shows recent years now warmer than the previous version but not really matching GISS (someone may know more about this).
You can’t access data from GISS at the moment (their server is down) but you might still get it through on this link.http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif
Here’s HADCRUT for comparison (before they change it).http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/comparison.html

There is a paper on this that argues that 17 years is required before a trend can be separated from a natural cycle.

As a statisitician I can say that identifying trends where there is a lot of variability is difficult – it depends where you begin and start. And as the data set gets larger, even if it is noisy, the statistics can identify a trend when in fact it is not. What the statistics do say quite clearly is that for the last 16 years there has not been a significant increase in average temperature. What Jo has pointed out so clearly is that this period was not predicted by any of the models. When a model fails to predict accurately as a scientist one must question the models.

Mind you, as a former professional modeller of natural systems I have been challenging the models and their predictions for 20 years. The problem with complex computer models is that their protagonists become wedded to them, so much so that they can’t recognise their weaknesses.

It showed to me how someone with deep enough pockets can avoid responsibility for their actions over and over again.

It got me thinking – if you’re you’re found guilty of something requiring damages to be paid, maybe it would be best if whatever you spent on your legal representation should be added to the damages to pay?

This way if someone spends $100k or something on lawyers but is still found guilty, they should have to pay the victim whatever the damages were as well as $100k.

Surely that might help to restore some semblance of equity to the legal system?

[Fixed the error in the name for you. Mod oggi p.s. why would you waste precious minutes watching that silver spoon tosser explain his inexcusable actions?]

Last weekend, I took a look at all 40 questions. The conspiracy questions I classified into 5 possible groups. With the numbers of questions they were.

1. Neutral to the climate change issue. (12)
2. Conspiracies that see the climate consensus as some sort of conspiracy. (1)
3. Conspiracies that see motivations for rejecting the climate consensus as some sort of conspiracy. (0)
4. Are conspiracies that those who reject the climate consensus might believe in, but unrelated to the climate issue. (1)
5. Are conspiracies that those who accept the climate consensus might believe in, but unrelated to the climate issue. (1 – but results not published)

That is, the questions on conspiracy theories were biased in such a way as to verify the Lewandowsky’s hypothesis.
The “New World Order” conspiracy theory is the one in category 4. An example of type 3. could be that “skeptics are funded by big oil interests”.

My point is that #8 is not a conspiracy “theory” at all – Its a well known and freely publicised fact (as per Bob Brown and his ilk). If Lewandowsky thinks is a conspiracy theory, then he is well out of touch with reality.

Lew’s sophistry and grotesque bias is laid bare when you compare question 8 to 7. Particularly since he didn’t release results for question 7.

7. The Iraq War in 2003 was launched for reasons other than to remove WMD from Iraq
8. A powerful and secretive group known as the New World Order are planning to eventually rule the world through an autonomous world government, which would replace sovereign governments

7. The Iraq War in 2003 was launched by western powers for the secret motive of gaining control of both Iraq’s natural oil resources and installing more pliable and manageable political institutions, all under the pretext of ending a non existent WMD programme asserted solely to create an acceptable pretext for military invasion.
8. There currently exists cross border political inertia that could potentially diminish engagement of pre-existing sovereign democratic institutions.

I personally would hesitantly answer ‘YES’ to the more ambiguous questions, and a resounding ‘NO’ to the wording outlining active conspiracy. Such results invariably befuddling intellectual giants such as Lew; because his internal mental model would consider such a result as contradictory and mutually exclusive.

This has nothing to do with whether or not the theory represents the data as best fit and has not been falsified, thus requiring a new theory. It does not address whether conflicting theories have been adequately explored. It does not address any procedural errors. It does not address the science in any way.

Reports are coming out that indicate 350.org (the very cold protesters in DC yesterday terrified of a warmer climate) is funded by the Rockefellers. If we are going to insist that funding matters, let’s have a little more full disclosure on the Warmist side.

With regard to the first posting – I would agree with the proposition that 16 years is not enough to be sure warming has stopped.
Consider:

Firstly, there is a 3.75 year cycle which has a peak to peak amplitude of 0.8 degrees C. This means that small rises in temperature, the 0.2 degrees C per decade of the IPCC, can be easily hidden for long periods of time. It takes several of these 3.75 year cycles to spot small variations in the small trends.

Secondly, There is also a 60 year cycle. Recall that there was a 1930s hysteria : “The Ice caps are melting and we are all going to fry!” followed closely by a “New Ice Age there is a thirty year cooling – we are all going to freeze!” followed by the latest : “Global Warming – we’re all going to fry!” which takes us to about 2000. Fact is it appears that we have just turned a corner and are heading into a cooling phase of these 60 year cycles. Given the amplitude of these previous cycles, I would be reluctant to listen to anyone who is now starting the “We’re going into an Ice age” hysteria without some very specific data. It may be 16-20 years before we are able to see whether that 60 year cyclic trend puts us into a new warming phase of the cycle or whether there is a genuine cooling ==> Ice Age trend.

Thirdly, what we may be looking for is a warming trend of just 0.06 degrees per decade which will be hard to spot.

The only predictions I have seen for the future where the author’s have actually had the balls to draw a line, The IPCC, Scarfetta, and Orssengo (plus Akasufo), all suggest a pause followed by return to rising temperatures all be it they all predict different rates of warming. I dont know if they are right – but the current data does not exclude the possibility.

So sure, keep an eye on the temp anomaly graphs, but be realistic about what you can expect to see. Consider that it may be years before a new trend that is distinguishable from the old trends becomes apparent. Lets not get too carried away with ice ages and keep an open mind until all alternate possibilities are excluded.

BA, nothing our beloved leader has done has worked!
The LNP will not state the truth that AGW is a crock because they do not make judgements on merit or reasoning. They make judgements based on the polls. Raw politicians make decisions based on polls, statesmen make judgements based on reason.

BA, they don’t need to. Stating the truth so blatantly would not change any rusted on ALP voters, and there may still be some people who would vote Lib who still believe this nonsense and might change their vote. So why take the risk.

I have written to different Lib leaders suggesting strongly that they drop the Renewable Energy Target, but no joy yet

Good thing is that the Libs “dams” initiative can be funded using climate adaptation funds, (maybe even from the sale of the ABC ?)

Just thing of the money the government would save if the funding to this crock -of- the -old proverbial was cut off.

The only federal member with any science qualification is (Liberal) Dennis Jensen (Tangney). He once broached the topic and suggested publically that the warming could well be natural and climate drivers largely non anthopogenic. To cut a long story short, the vilification from the rabid left was iniquitous, stinging, wholly unscientific and entirely in keeping with those of this ilk. Unfortunately it seemed to have worked ( a very succesful tactic) and he slunk back in his box. Science is not a popularity contest but politics is.

Yes, Nev, one of the tricks of alarmists is to use the past as a reference without actually looking at the past. I had a good go over the weekend at trying to get someone to stare, as it were, at some significant past events. The eyes were quickly averted. Old events were dismissed as “cherry-picked” or “dredged up”.

One enormity we are supposed to overlook is the cooling between the 30s and 70s. Arctic temps plunging in the sixties, ice build-up in the seventies…none of this will serve the warmist mindset, so it is not looked at.

I’m one of the people who is a cooling skeptic, and for the very good reason that I remember the last cooling panic, around the time of this video. I’m open to arguments about a “coming ice age” or new LIA, but it’s just so clear from all the shattered certainties of “experts” in the past that we are still not in the know. Scientists are good-to-great at certain things, but most are mediocre at thinking – I mean that! – and we need to heed Eisenhower’s warning about putting our lives in the hands of a technocracy.

The smartest scientist I ever knew used to put on his coat first and then remove the coat hanger.

I suspect that we will now see a gradual decline of temps over the next few decades, then a climb back up (in about 60 years) to a level about the same as now.

I hope that we don’t get something akin to the Maunder period, that would be devastating particularly in countries like the UK that have downgraded their coal fired power capability and placed ANY reliance on wind and solar. Wind turbines do not work when they are covered in ice, neither do solar panels !!

And he was cautious about intervening in any way in a climate that was not understood very well.
“We can’t predict with any certainty what’s going to happen with our own climatic future. How can we then come along and intervene in that ignorance?”

A great question, Stephen. I guess another 12 years of study made ALL the difference. Ha! Cess et al in 1989 says OMG CLOUDS!!
Somehow all that uncertainty on clouds got swept under the rug just in time for the 1990 IPCC First Assessment Report.
How CAN we intervene in all that ignorance?

An interesting tidbit I discovered in my trawl was that NCAR was quite open about their models in the beginning.

The first version used pieces drawn from the work of an Australian group, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and several others. In 1983 NCAR published all its computer source codes along with a “Users’ Guide” so that outside groups could run the model on their own machines.

I dont believe in conspiracy theories but here are a few quotes I keep on file.

In their own words ….

‘ …Among other things, the United Nations System Chief Executives Board for Coordination (CEB) heard Ban (Ki-moon)’s top organizer, a U.N. Under Secretary General from China named Sha Zukang, declare that the wish list for the Rio + 20 meeting, already being touted as a landmark environmental conclave on the issue of “global environmental governance”, included making it: “ the catalyst for solidifying a global economic, social and political agenda, built around “green economy” goals.’

UN Durban round proposes a centralised unelected court to enforce the UN will on climate change and a tax on the west to pay for it all, the money of course being channelled through the UN’s coffers. The draft report at the Durban round is described:

“ Who pays? Oh, you guessed it before I told you. The West pays. The third world (UN code: “non-Annex-I parties”) thinks it will collect, so it will always vote for the UN’s insane proposals. But the UN’s bureaucrats will actually get all or nearly all the money, and will decide how to allocate what minuscule fraction they have not already spent on themselves. As a senior UN diplomat told me last year, “The UN exists for only one purpose: to get more money. That, and that alone, is the reason why it takes such an interest in climate change.” The draft says: “Developed-country Parties shall provide developing-country Parties with new and additional finance, inter alia through a percentage of the gross domestic product of developed-country Parties.” And, of course, “The extent of participation by non-Annex-I parties in the global effort to deal with climate change is directly dependent on the level of support provided by developed-country Parties.” ”

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention…and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself….believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or…one invented for the purpose.” Quote by the Club of Rome.

”We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis.” – David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager – Trustee of The Rockefeller Foundation a heavy funder of environmental causes.

Maurice Strong, senior advisor to Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General who chaired the gigantic (40,000 participants) “U.N. Conference on Environment and Development” in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 , who was responsible for putting together the Kyoto Protocol with thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats, and politicians, stated:

“We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse…isn’t it our job to bring that about?”

Timothy Wirth, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Issues, seconded Strong’s statement:
“We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Also speaking at the Rio conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick, who then headed the policy divisions of the U.S. State Department said:

“A global warming treaty [Kyoto] must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”

“No matter if the science of global warming is all phoney … climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” – Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment

In 1996, former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev emphasized the importance of using climate alarmism to advance socialist Marxist objectives:

“The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.”

Speaking at the 2000 U.N. Conference on Climate Change in the Hague, former President Jacques Chirac of France explained why the IPCC’s climate initiative supported a key Western European Kyoto Protocol objective:

“For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance, one that should find a place within the World Environmental Organization which France and the European Union would like to see established.”

“This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy….one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy” – Ottmar Edehoffer, UN IPCC

18 Feb: Age Opinion, John Cook, University of Queensland: There is no such thing as climate change denial
In a sense, there is no such thing as climate change denial. No one denies that climate changes (in fact, the most common climate myth is the argument that past climate change is evidence that current global warming is also natural). Then what is being denied? Quite simply, the scientific consensus that humans are disrupting the climate. A more appropriate term would be “consensus denial”.
There are two aspects to scientific consensus. Most importantly, you need a consensus of evidence – many different measurements pointing to a single, consistent conclusion. As the evidence piles up, you inevitably end up with near-unanimous agreement among actively researching scientists: a consensus of scientists…
A prominent Australian fake expert is Ian Plimer, the go-to guy for political leaders and fossil fuel billionaires. He hasn’t published a single peer-reviewed paper on climate change…
Finally, with consensus denial comes the inevitable conspiracy theories…
A key element to meaningful climate action is closing the consensus gap. This means identifying and rebutting the many rhetorical techniques employed to deny the scientific consensus.
This article was adapted from Understanding Climate Change Denial.
John Cook does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations…
This article was originally published at The Conversation…http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/there-is-no-such-thing-as-climate-change-denial-20130218-2ely3.html

I could guess that NASCAR racing might be the furthest things from the minds of people who come here to Joanne’s site, but this is actually interesting.

I see that the first race of the season is next week, the showpiece for NASCAR, the Daytona 500.

Unlike our huge event at Bathurst, which lasts 4 days, the Americans spread this out over 2 weekends.

They have the undercard second tier event on the first weekend along with qualifying for Pole for the main race next weekend, the big one.

That second tier event is the Sprint Cup. It was won by Kevin Harvick in a Chevy SS.

In a real coup, a woman has won pole for the main race, the Daytona 500, Danica Patrick, also driving a Chevy SS. It’s the first time a woman has won pole position for a first tier NASCAR race, let alone the Daytona 500.

So, despite the fact that a woman has done this, big deal some of you may say, and after all, it’s only a U.S. car race.

So here’s the punch line.

A month or two back, in a blaze of publicity, Chevrolet announced its new NASCAR race car for this year, the new Chevy SS.

This is somewhat loosely based around the Chevy SS that Americans can buy off the show room floor ….. in much the same manner as the Ford or Holden, (or now Nissan and Mercedes) V8 Supercars we race here in Australia resemble the showroom versions of the Falcon and Commodore.

So, nothing much in that!

However, the new Chevy SS is basically a Holden Commodore, made here in Oz as LHD and then exported to the U,S. for sale as the Chevy SS.

So not only is this a coup for Chevy, it’s now a coup for Holden as well, putting a Holden on the front row of the grid for the Daytona 500.

I heard a rumour that they are planning to run the Indy 500 this year for racers with electric motors only.

There are minor some teething problems though.

Because of the batteries, the weight of each racer has more than tripled.

Then at the required speeds to be competitive, the cars will need to stop every 5 laps for a recharge, which will take 7 hours.

They’ve worked out that the Indy 500 run in this format will see the race taking almost fourteen and a half days to run, day and night.

Some teams are experimenting with adding solar panels to the car, but evidently, it plays havoc with the aerodynamics, and they haven’t found a way to anchor the 28 panels to the monocoque chassis. Some further teams have even considered adding a small wind turbine, but the driver has to sit lower in the cockpit to avoid the fast spinning blade and some vision is obscured.

It’s all good though, because they’re going to make a fortune from the sale of night vision goggles for the vast crowd expected to front up for the race. The food franchises are also rubbing their hands together with glee.

The city of Inianapolis is saying this new format could see the inflow of hundreds of millions of dollars into the city for the duration of the race, so I guess it’s a win win for everyone really.

Unfortunately for Australia, anything manufactured here is seen to be too expensive in the USA.

Labour costs in Australia are high (compared to the USA) and Australia has taxes on energy inputs to manufacturing (carbon tax).

The domestic car industry is perhaps in a bigger mess than it was before the Button Plan started to be rolled out. The plan’s objectives were soon abandoned and the the pain of competition began to be felt. The industry is “protected” by subsidies to the cost of manufacture.

Great, just what you want in a race car – light at the rear end, and bits falling off at random.

I had a Holden station wagon once. I kept getting bits of grey plastic molding appearing in the front footwells. I could never see where they came from, let alone figure how to put them back. When I got rid of it, there was a cardboard box in the back, that contained all of the bits … no longer my problem.

For the record, NASCARs have almost nothing in common with any modern street car. All frames and body panels are handmade in specialist shops. They are not what they seem: for example, the ‘headlights’ are decals. The engines are specified rigidly to 1960s designs and are remarkably low tech, with push rods and carburettors. Turbocharging etc strictly verboten.

Bob, but even by Glikson’s standards this effort is bad; for instance he says:

The current CO2 level generates amplifying feedbacks, including the reduced capacity of warming water to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere

This is just wrong; CO2 and H2O have overlapping absorption and emission frequencies, which means extra H2O will REDUCE the absorption of IR by CO2; see Harde and extra CO2 REDUCES the absorption of H2O; see Nahle.

This is terrible; Glikson contradicts basic science!

Glikson then rabbits on about residency times for CO2 of thousands of years which has been disproved by Essenhigh.

And he asserts that agriculture developed during the Holocene without mentioning the fact that much higher CO2 levels following the warming was responsible for that development as Sage has found.

Today I saw a proposal by the Friends of The Earth that does NOT appear to be loony but is actually a pro-environmental and pro-human lobbying position.
Yeah, I know, that surprised me too. If I have missed some misanthropic implication of their position, please let us know.

Basically they are saying that there is some evidence bacteria can evolve resistance to nano-silver compounds, just as they have to triclosan and other anti-bacterial agents, and so the increasingly widespread deployment of nano-silver additives for general public use should be curtailed by regulation.
Here is their lobbying statement PDF: Nano-Silver – policy failure puts public health at risk
This has been trumpeted with an opinion piece published on (where else) the ABC: Save the silver for where it’s needed.

Astonishingly greenhouse gases are even mentioned but it is a token effort that has little behind it. Aside from that minor point, I reckon this statement generally is one instance of the rabid environmentalists actually getting it right for a change.

Although they don’t specifically say this, the strategy also implies international action would be necessary to achieve an effective defence posture, because there is not much to stop a silver-resistant strain bred in another country making the voyage to Australia. We have enough problems with Customs officers smuggling drugs into and around Australia to believe they can stop bacteria at the airport!

Even if this is a real threat, if international cooperation is needed, the bacteria will evolve far faster than any agreement can be reached. Bacteria don’t have governments, scientists, environmentalist and so forth to deal with. They just do their thing.

The AWU, which is holding its national conference on the Gold Coast, has entered into an alliance with one of the biggest union bodies in the US ahead of the [Australian] federal election, as more global companies look to outsource work to China and Central America.

[...]
Mr King’s union was credited with playing a key role in the re-election of US President Barack Obama.
“By going down to the delegate level, by going down to the local union level, and the commitments of every local union leader to talk every day to their members about why the election was important, we won an amazing victory,” he said.
“I know you can do the same thing here.”

AWU national secretary Paul Howes said his union would be learning from industrial bodies in the US how to campaign and engage with communities.

Note the URL betrays the original author’s headline before it was moderated by NineMSN “Gillard wooing blue collar workers”. But this goes beyond buying votes.

Those who are aware of the way the USA government has co-opted the unions who then assisted with the offshoring of jobs from America will look on this news with horror.
Compare with this account of the last four years of activity in other major USA unions:

Obama’s forced restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler in 2009 ushered in a wave of wage- and benefit-cutting throughout the private sector. The bailout of the auto giants was predicated on the agreement of the United Auto Workers union to impose a 50 percent wage cut and the gutting of pensions and benefits for all newly hired workers. This set a new benchmark of $12-$15 an hour for US auto workers, previously among the highest paid manufacturing workers in the world, reducing wages to near-poverty levels.
[...]
If a portion of the manufacturing jobs that were previously moved to China and other low-wage havens are being brought back to the US, it is because the wages they pay have plummeted so far and the differential has so dramatically narrowed that the corporations can make higher profits by exploiting their “own” workers than by going overseas.

All with the “agreement” of “workers”, ie really the agreement of unions. The unions are in effect functioning as a destroyer of worker pay and conditions by creating a false consensus of employees that accepting lower pay and conditions must occur to save total job numbers. It is no co-incidence that the unions’ slush funds depend on dues paid by total number of workers, not on the actual wealth of their remaining members. Whether the unions’ destructive effects on worker conditions in the USA is by ulterior globalist design or through simple middleman greed is a matter of some speculation.
That opinion goes on to state that government jobs were not immune:

Beginning in 2010, the wage-cutting attack was extended to public-sector workers, who were hit with massive layoffs and cuts in wages, pensions and health care by state and local governments, with the support of the White House.

So the public sector workers unions were not of much use in that situation.
That author concludes that more socialism is the answer, but this is incredible given that unions appear to have not helped much and so is just an example of the false left/right dichotomy being used to divide people and play them against each other while the government-corporate symbiosis screws them all.

Some others believe the union situation in Illinois is indicative of the entire country, due to a group based in Chicago now exerting influence nationally:

In the opinion of this reporter, Speaker Madigan is taking a middle road in his approach to the unions. Former Mayor Daley simply ordered the city’s unions to take pay and benefit cuts. All but one union did and that union saw its ranks devastated by City Hall layoffs in retribution. Current Mayor Rahm Emanuel promotes an anti-union public profile, but behind the scenes is buying off organized labor temporarily while he finalizes the outsourcing of all their government jobs to multi-national corporations.

And the AWU is now married to unions from the USA.
This Frankenunion stitched together from monstrous parts certainly could “do the same thing here” if given half a chance.

The warming religion is alive and well in the Victorian Government service. This afternoon [18/02] on 3AW the presenter interviewed the CEO of the Victorian Department of the Environment [ a female whose name I forget and am too lazy to Google for ]in respect to water restrictions. Out came the mantra on global warming and diminishing rainfall and increased temperatures none of which the presenter [Tom Elliott] challenged. It seems we have changed political parties in power but not the base creed of those steering government instrumentalities and presenters either too lazy to challenge such drivel or actually supporters of same. After two years of Timid Ted I despair.

For something that according to Dr David Viner of the East Anglia CRU, in 2000 that within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.and “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” There sure is a lot of it

There is about as much chance of me watching that show as there is of me watching an endless loop of the Socceroos getting knocked out of Olympic Gold by the Italian faking a tripping incident.
A senseless and unjust tragedy based on deception that I can do nothing to stop.

Okay I could have said it’s a “slow motion train wreck” but that wouldn’t have been original.

Oh! Oh! We received death threats from skeptics!
No, no you didn’t, the FOIA response showed none at all.
It should have been an “own goal” against the warminista but of course the Team lie is halfway around the world before the FOIA gets its footy boots on.

All the “global warming” can be explained by a miniscule change in humidity.

0.4 grams of water vapour per kg of dry air is about all that it takes to change the temperature of the air by 0.7⁰C while maintaining the same heat content. A kg of air has a volume of about 0.85 m³ (850 litres); depending on temperature and humidity. The moisture content of air varies between 0 and 40 g/kg with a daily variation of 10 g/kg not being unusual where liquid water is available at the surface.

These figures are available at a glance on a typical psychrometric chart (PDF) as used by HVAC engineers and airconditioning technicians to figure out the necessary size of equipment for the heating and airconditioning of buildings. Such charts provide not only dense information, but also a visualisation of the couplings between temperature, humidity, density and the energy stored in the air.

While automatic weather stations typically report and record humidity at minute to 5-minute intervals, such data aren’t used at all for climate models. If the climatologists are looking for “energy balance”, then they must consider the substantial energy that the water vapour stores, instead of relying on the dry-bulb daily arithmetic mean of minimum and maximum extremes as an indicator.

Bernd – There is a study of moist and dry locations in the Appendix of my paper “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures” which is linked in another comment here. It shows the measurements of how much cooler water vapour makes the climate in the more moist regions.

The paper explains why the physics involved in atmospheric and sub-surface heat transfer appears to have been misunderstood, and incorrectly applied, when postulating that a radiative “greenhouse effect” is responsible for warming the surfaces of planets such as Venus and our own Earth.

A detailed discussion of the application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics endeavours to settle the much debated issue as to whether or not a thermal gradient evolves spontaneously in still air in a gravitational field. The author is aware of attempted rebuttals of this hypothesis, but cogent counter arguments are presented, together with reference to empirical evidence.

The ramifications are substantial, in that they eliminate any need for any “greenhouse” explanation as to why the surface temperatures are as observed. No other valid reason appears plausible to explain how the required energy gets into the planetary surfaces, this being especially obvious in regard to the high temperatures measured at the surface of the crust of Venus.

The paper includes some counter-intuitive concepts which sceptical readers may be tempted to reject out of hand. Physics sometimes has some surprises, and so you are encouraged to read and understand the argument step by step, for it is based on sound physics, and unlocks some mysteries of the Solar System, including core and mantle temperatures, not previously explained in this manner to the best of the author’s knowledge.

Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2 variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2. In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets: 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO2 data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC data on release of anthropogene CO2, and 8) GWP data on volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7) and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature. The maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2 lagging 11–12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5–10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature. The correlation between changes in ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 is high, but do not explain all observed changes.

I wasn’t in any way involved in that journal paper published in “Global and Planetary Change” (Vol. 100, Jan 2013) and I only learnt of it today. The implication appears to be that warmer temperatures cause the release of more carbon dioxide from the oceans, this happening about 9 to 11 months later.

Note that in the Appendix of my paper is a small study of the relationship between daily maximum and minimum temperatures versus precipitation and, not at all surprisingly, we see that drier cities have slightly higher minimums and significantly higher maximums. I know this is a small sample of only 15 inland tropical cities, and I intend to do a larger one after my open heart surgery on March 8th – if I’m still on the planet.

The cooling by water vapour is due to the fact that it reduces the absolute magnitude of the thermal gradient (AKA wet adiabatic lapse rate) and so, when radiative equilibrium is established, the supported surface temperature is lower. Only at the margin does water vapour slow radiative cooling (not non-radiative) between day and night for example. But this is a negligible effect compared with about a 7 to 8 degree lowering of surface temperatures.

In a nutshell, the 255K figure is inaccurate for a start. It needs to be adjusted downwards when treating the Earth as a rotating sphere (rather than flat) and then adjusted upwards because of lower emissivity of the atmosphere. The net effect brings it to about 270K. Then the autonomous gravitationally induced thermal gradient (necessitated as a corollary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) adds about 25 degrees in a dry world, but water vapour reduces this by about 7 or 8 degrees so that we get back to14 or 15 deg.C.

Billiard balls give a good idea of molecular motion. Imagine two players each shooting a ball at the same time and same speed from the centre of each end of the table, such that the balls are aimed at each other and meet in the centre of the table. The balls will each cancel the other ball’s momentum. But then slope the table with props under one end, and repeat the process. This time gravity causes one to accelerate and the other to slow down more, so that there will be net downward momentum when they collide. So, if you had a horizontal cylinder of air and then rotated it to a vertical position, more molecules would immediately “fall” to the lower half, thus increasing the pressure quite quickly. However, it then takes much longer for diffusion of kinetic energy to establish the temperature gradient.

Many people think increasing pressure causes and maintains increased temperature, and vice versa, that expansion causes and maintains a cooler temperature. This is not what physics says will happen. The reason is seen in the above example. The pressure comes first (as fast as a marble would fall in the cylinder) and the temperature gradient comes later due to diffusion. The reason is that temperature depends only upon the mean kinetic energy of the molecules, whereas pressure depends on both the mean KE and the density of molecules. (See Wikipedia “Kinetic Theory”) Hence it can be very hot in the thermosphere, but the pressure is very low. And likewise, pressure is not the reason why the surface of Venus is so hot.

So pressure is not proportional to temperature as some seem to think. It would be easy to find a region high up in the Venus atmosphere where the pressure is only 1% of that at the surface. But you won’t find that the temperature there is only 1% of 730K, that is 7.3K. The gas would be solid and would have collapsed towards the surface.

There is a very detailed discussion of the gravitationally induced thermal gradient from Section 4 to Section 7 in my paper.

There have been many new members this month. Most prominent among them is John Sanderson, immediate past president of the Royal College of Science Association, Prof. Ole Humlum of the University of Oslo, Prof. Cliff Ollier of the University of Western Australia.

*15. Support for the Mantle and Core Temperatures

The mystery of planetary core and mantle temperatures can now be unravelled with the concept of heat creep. Borehole measurements [27] indicate a thermal gradient of about 25 to 30°C/Km in the outer 10Km or so of the Earth’s crust. This is what we would expect, because the mean specific heat of earth, rock and clay is about a quarter that of atmospheric air, and a “pseudo” rate would also develop because of intra-molecular radiation. But specific heat increases significantly at higher temperatures, leading to the thermal gradient in the deep mantle being perhaps even less than 1°C/Km because the specific heat is in the denominator of the -g/Cp quotient.

Now, we need to see the big picture. There must be a continuous thermal plot which rises, at least from the top of the troposphere, down to the surface and then, at a steeper upward gradient in the outer crust, curving over to an almost level plot as it approaches the core. The whole plot has evolved autonomously by conduction and diffusion processes over the life of the Earth, and presumably similar plots have evolved on other planets like Venus.

Energy from the Sun “creeps” up the thermal plane, not only supporting surface temperatures, but even those of the crust, mantle and core. So, if insufficient energy is generated beneath the surface, then the shortfall will come from the Sun, at least over the course of many years.

The key point is that this plot would be very stable, and we should have nothing to worry about for thousands of years because it would take a huge amount of extra energy (which could only come from the Sun) to raise the whole length of the plot from the tropopause to the core.

When the Sun warms the surface by day, it merely deposits extra thermal energy at the boundary so that some flows into the crust and top layers of the ocean, and some provides extra warmth in the first 100m or so of the atmosphere. This extra pile of energy dissipates at night, the marginal cooling process being slowed by non-radiative and radiative processes.

But the big picture is, that the underlying thermal plot “supports” both the surface temperatures and even those in the crust, mantle and perhaps the core. It does not matter if extra energy is created in the core, or trapped temporarily at the surface, because the cooling process will accelerate if the temperature gap widens, or slow down when the gap narrows. Even the apparent loss of energy in the calculated terrestrial flow is misleading, because it is based on a thermal gradient that gravity formed and over which energy might even be flowing up towards the mantle, from where it may be released in volcanoes, thermal springs or undersea vents.

16. Conclusions

When Maxwell and Boltzmann dismissed Loschmidt’s postulate of a gravity gradient they did the world a great disservice, and they contributed to a belief in a non-existent warming by an imaginary radiative greenhouse effect. The subsequent “calls to authority” should be a lesson for all in the scientific world, for this has resulted in an absolute travesty of physics. The greenhouse conjecture will inevitably take its brief place in history as the biggest and most costly mistake ever in the field of human scientific endeavour. Hopefully that will be soon.

Scientists, be they climatologists, physicists or whatever, need to step outside the square and to adopt a paradigm shift based on, and supported by 21st century science. Dr Hans Jelbring and Roderich Graeff have each made significant contributions which must now be heeded before the mistake is perpetuated by those who now have personal vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

Climate has in fact been following natural cycles [28] as shown in the Appendix to the author’s paper on Radiated Energy [2] and the world can expect a period of about 500 years of cooling to start within 50 to 200 years from now.

The Loschmidt gravity-induced thermal gradient is more than enough to explain the proverbial “33 degrees of warming” and in fact the dry adiabatic lapse rate would lead to a mean surface temperature of about 25°C were it not for water vapour and, yes, to a much smaller extent, carbon dioxide reducing the gradient and causing lower base surface temperatures. In the Appendix is an outline of methodology that would almost certainly produce studies which would demonstrate the cooling effect of water in locations around the world.

Thermal energy can and does “creep” up the very shallow thermal gradients in planetary atmospheres and also in their solid crusts and mantles, supporting sub-surface temperatures. Indeed the physics of “heat creep” resolves the long-term puzzles of planetary core and surface temperatures, and, for this very reason, begs attention and claims validity for this 21st century new paradigm shift in climate change science. [29]

1. The thermal gradient (AKA “effective lapse rate”) is pre-determined by the force of gravity, the weighted mean specific heat of the gases in a planet’s atmosphere (at that altitude) and the degree of intra-molecular radiation which, in the case of Earth, is somewhat dependent on the percentage of water vapour which, as is well known, makes the gradient less steep.

2. The overall level of the plot is established by the autonomous propensity for there to be radiative equilibrium with incident Solar radiation. The area under the curved plot of outward radiative intensity thus has a propensity to remain constant if the gradient alters. So extra water vapour makes it less steep by lowering the surface end and raising the tropopause end.

3. The surface temperature can then be calculated by extrapolation of the thermal plot of temperature against altitude in the troposphere. The temperature can be derived using SBL from the values of radiative flux at each altitude from (2). The higher the tropopause, the greater the distance over which the temperature can rise, this explaining why Venus is much hotter than Earth.

4. The mechanism whereby the thermal plot is maintained involves the absorption of energy originally from the Sun (both in downwelling and upwelling radiation) which is then dispersed in all directions over the thermal plane, in order to maintain thermodynamic equilibrium, in accord with the requirements of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

5. The thermal plot continues its upward climb more steeply in the crust (due to lower specific heat) but far less steeply in the hottest regions of the mantle because specific heat increases significantly with increasing temperatures.

6. Heat creep, as described in (4) allows thermal energy to enter deeply into the subsurface regions and, eventually, to support core temperatures and provide energy which can contribute to that in volcanoes and thermal springs and vents.

7.The surface warms temporarily during the day and then both radiative and non-radiative processes slow its rate of cooling, but there is a limit to such cooling due to the underlying very stable thermal plot of temperature against altitude or underground depth. This is why the base of the atmosphere does not continue cooling at a fast rate all through the night. The force of gravity redistributes absorbed energy in such a way as to provide a supporting temperature at the boundary of the surface and atmosphere, and even at the boundary of the mantle and core.